Well, in this case, I don’t think that the information from the CDC is utter nonsense; it should be considered on balance. If they’re right, then the more lethal Delta is still an ongoing concern. Unvaccinated people aren’t at risk of most likely getting just a mild infection, as I imagine many of them are thinking.
Delta did not suddenly become more infectious. Everywhere we see exponential growth in cases, it"s because Omicron has supplanted Delta, typically within a couple of weeks.
What happens after Omicron bruns itself out remains to be seen. No word yet from South Africa on that score.
So you don’t think there’s any significant contribution to overall cases, in spite of the report that 41% turned out to be Delta last week, nation-wide? That these data are wholly bogus and Delta is gone?
The CDC report is incompetent guesswork that’s contradicted by the exponential growth in cases driven by Omicron.
I haven’t yet found any actual sequencing data breaking down cases by variant for places that have had exponential growth for several weeks. Delta’s presumably still dominant elsewhere, if there are still such places.
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data-variants.page
Looks like Omicron’s now in every state. Even the ones at the bottom have a sharp turn upward for the past week or so. Which makes sense given record-breaking holiday air travel.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html
Here are the proportions by region (last update, 12/25). Omicron is purple. Delta is orange.
I’m concerned with a public mindset that diminishes the feeling of urgency for vaccinations and boosters due to the perception that they’re not needed because “delta is gone and omicron is mild”. And concerned that the existing monoclonal antibodies are being pulled back because they don’t work against omicron. (What if it’s actually delta in a given case? The routine tests don’t distinguish between variants.)
It seems all but certain that omicron will almost entirely push out delta – not simply “dominate” percentage-wise. But not just yet. Right now it’s still a mix.
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Do they describe how they get to the numbers (delta vs omicron) - so far the US was horrible in sequence the positive cases and tend to extrapolate which often us quite “off”.
In an hospital setting they will run a sequencing before administering any antibodies
No, I didn’t dig into how the CDC got their numbers, but that’s available in a branch off of the link where the map came from:
There are unspecified error bars (although the overall percentages for the US as a whole are given to three significant figures!), but in the end the message is the same.
From their webpage “ Through partnerships with state and local public health agencies CDC requests up to 750 total specimens per week from all states and jurisdictions for sequencing and further characterization of representative viruses.”
Sad low number compared to other countries and confirms doubts about their overall numbers for delta vs omicron
That’s not hard data, it’s the CDC’s incompetent bullshit. Everywhere where there’s exponential growth is virtually all Omicron.
Some routine test results actually can be classified as Omicron and other without doing full sequencing That’s where some of the most detailed data to date in studies cited above came from.
By the end of January this will no doubt be a moot discussion, but my guess is that right now the CDC’s guess is better than my guess and maybe better than your guess, too.
They’re supposed to provide an updated bullshit guess today. Stay tuned.
(BTW, I haven’t exactly gone to the defense of the CDC in the past 18+ months…)
If you base your guess on such a small dataset as the CDC(also looking on data in other countries with excellent genetic sequencing capabilities like Denmark and England) I have doubts that their guess is good. According to their own webpage their predictions are vastly underpowered
Well, OK. But if we can remember way back to mid-November, pre-Omicron, lots of people were predicting a winter surge in cases. The early upswing in cases has to have been largely delta, and it’s still contributing to the total case counts, regardless of the accuracy of the estimates, IMO. And it well may be that many of those that are hospitalized have delta. There’s still urgency in getting vaccinated/boosted.
The good news on all of these plots is that hospitalizations and deaths aren’t tracking the rise in cases, even accounting for a two-week offset. And a steadily increasing number of reports make it sound like only the most frail are at risk of dying from omicron.
The bad news is that emergency rooms are getting crowded by people who turn out to have covid but don’t require hospitalization.
A lot of experts didn’t predict a significant winter surge pre-omicron. (Just one example)
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We still don’t have solid data on whether / how much less a risk Omicron is for vaccinated and boosted people over 65 and/or with “certain medical conditions." Seems like that ought to be clear within two weeks at most.
Our findings confirm that the rapid spread of the Omicron (variant) primarily can be ascribed to the immune evasiveness rather than an inherent increase in the basic transmissibility
New pre-paper out with interesting data around the impact of covid on the body/brain and that long covid could become a major concern in particular with omicron
What it says about Omicron is:
The survey was conducted from 28 September to 21 October 2021, when the predominant SARS-CoV-2 variant in Canada was Delta (4 weeks prior to the appearance of Omicron).
…
We also cannot conclude that the same associations would be observed with the Omicron variant, in particular because of the lower COVID-19 symptom severity apparent with Omicron in comparison with earlier variants, at least based on early data. In the current (pre-Omicron) sample, we found that only moderate and higher COVID-19 symptom severities were associated with significantly elevated symptoms of executive dysfunction. Further analyses of follow-up waves of the CCEP data will enable examination of the relative impact of the Omicron variant on symptoms of executive dysfunction.
It is clear that you can’t just translate everything to omicron from delta. At the same time similar studies between alpha and delta showed a reasonable good correlation and I am quite certain that especially for those many millions of unvaccinated people omicron data will also reasonably good correlate
I would make no such assumption given that some studies suggest that Omicron is typically limited to the upper respiratory system. So far it seems significantly less likely to put people in the hospital, hospital stays are shorter, and those who are hospitalized are less likely to end up in the ICU. All of those seem likely to correlate with a lower incidence of executive dysfunction.